for revolt against all ritual, a woman's munificence has prepared a fitting house for prayer, and even for full harmonious praise. What can we do but remember another Restoration, and say, 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the LORD of Hosts'?

ART. VIII.—RENAN'S L'ÉGLISE CHRÉTIENNE.

L'Eglise Chrétienne. Par ERNEST RENAṆ. De l'Académie Française et de l'Académie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres. Paris. Calmann Lévy, Editeur: ancienne Maison Michel Lévy Frères. Nouvelle édition. (Paris, 1879.)

SIXTEEN editions of the Vie de Jésus in sixteen years have accustomed the public mind to M. Renan's utterances, and volume after volume of the 'Origines' of Christianity, as the series is called, appearing in due course, no longer startle us, yet do not fail to interest thoughtful readers. The Life of Jesus was soon followed by The Apostles, Saint Paul, The Antichrist and The Gospels. We have now The Christian Church; and we are promised the seventh and last volume 'to appear shortly,' Marcus Aurelius.

A philosophical view of the whole range of M. Renan's speculations on the 'phenomenon' of Christianity can hardly be taken till the last volume is before us; and we almost doubt whether Marcus Aurelius can be the last, if the relations of Christianity and classic heathenism are to be fairly estimated. There is, thus far, a psychological distinctness, however, which separates M. Renan from all our other historical critics, and which is recognized at once. Starting, as he did, with a poetical intention of doing some justice to the character, position, and aims of our Blessed Lord, as the embodiment of an enthusiasm of humanity,' he soon found certain matter-of-fact human surroundings of the Christian idea, which had to be dealt with somewhat more exactly. The literature, too, which rapidly accompanied the Gospel of the 'prophet of Galilee' seemed to be unexplained by any dim exposition of enthusiasm of humanity;' and still less were the corporate institutes which sprang up, on so many sides, as the work of Christ's disciples, and the controversies

His

which pervaded them, to be at all accounted for thus. original theory is therefore gradually lost sight of by M. Renan, and criticism in his later volumes has, for the present, greatly taken the place of the philosophy put forth at first with so light and confident a tone.

We have now to do with the 'sixth volume,' the present literary instalment, entitled the Christian Church, which is supposed to be presented to us in its historical position at the opening of the second century.

At the death of Trajan (117) began a new era for the Roman world. The empire, its religion and laws, had reached a crisis, at which reform and consolidation could not safely be delayed; and Hadrian took the task resolutely in hand, accomplishing on the whole a greater change than any other ruler between Augustus and Diocletian. He visited all the provinces and interested himself personally in all the necessary public works. The various nationalities which constituted his vast dominion were a kind of personal study for the Emperor. Their religions and customs were examined, and a noble toleration extended to all. But though a friend of Epictetus, Hadrian had no high standard of morals or religion. Nevertheless he made a liberal allowance for recognized local habits everywhere, as the practical standard of social manners. He inaugurated, certainly, a better politico-social system in Rome, from the palace to the forum, from the forum to the family, which in fact made the access of Christian ideas more possible than hitherto; while under him the codification of the whole Roman law went steadily forward. Restored superstitions at the same time were able to regard the Emperor as a patron; and the Jews themselves for a while hailed him as friend-(though they were cruelly undeceived at last).

·

Hadrian had also a more than superficial acquaintance, through Aquila of Sinope (if we may trust the stories of the Talmud), with the faith and institutions of Christianity; and the Imperial fairness towards Christians is acknowledged in the Apologies,' and the popular animosity only is there the chief subject of complaint. No attempt apparently had been made by Christianity, from S. Paul to Quadratus of Athens, (and after him Aristides), to challenge the definite notice of the empire; and so the times of Hadrian would, by these apologetic appeals alone, seem to show a fresh starting-point for the Christian Church.

But the Christian literature here is scanty. M. Renan would fix the first appearance, at this time, of the Gospel of

S. John, the 'Fourth Gospel' (in that case somewhat uncritically so called), as the beginning of a new Christian philosophy; which yet it could not have been, if the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians had preceded it, as he has conceded in his former volumes, as well as in this. It seems necessary, however, to our author to suppose that Christianity at this time put forth another theory of the character of Christ, in order to meet the growing Gnosticism, and suitably elevate the Author of our faith before the heathen. This seems, however, pure supposition (like so much in M. Renan), for, as far as the Church is concerned, there is nothing at all in history to justify it, nothing even to show that Gnosticism in the times of Hadrian had assumed this new character, which obliged in the Christian body the vital change of front. S. Paul had confronted Gnosticism in his day, as truly as S. John in the next generation. It is noticeable here, as elsewhere, that M. Renan's needs having suggested to him theories, the theories are soon stated as facts. Here, as elsewhere, he avails himself of the valuable resort, 'tout est possible à ces époques ténébreuses' (p. 54).

The truth unquestionably is (though M. Renan sees everything through a Gnostic haze) that the Gospel of S. John is irreconcilable with M. Renan's special view of the Synoptics; and as this Gospel had to be dealt with, M. Renan had little option but to place it in times a little removed from his Story of Galilee,' and there encounter it. Not indeed that the change of position will help him. An effectual argument, if needed, against M. Renan's theory, 'that the Christ of the Gospels of SS. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, claims a character less Divine than the Christ of S. John,' might be the juxtaposition of the assertions of the Synoptics with those of the last Gospel, as to the personal claims of Him, who is the 'Immanuel' of the former, and the 'Word' of the latter. A collocation of the assertion, for instance, that the 'Son hath life in Himself,' with 'In Him was Life, and the Life was the light of men,' as repeated by the 'loved disciple' (and similar passages), would be decisive. The list of nearly identical phrases would be a considerable one. But M. Renan's next, and not novel anxiety is, to identify with the Logos of Philo the "Word made flesh' of the New Testament. Here, however, we might appeal with some confidence to our author himself, whether the philosophy of Philo, incomplete as it is, has not the clear and uniform distinction of placing an entire chasm between God and the Word?-and if so, how can this be thought 'the same as the doctrine of S. John's Gospel '?

There is nothing at all to complain of in M. Renan's here dealing with Gnosticism itself. No doubt it is his sheet anchor throughout his book, but it belonged to the Hadrianic time; and its phenomena, as presented in the second Christian century, have a place and meaning, in Gospel development, which has been perhaps insufficiently weighed. But its course is in some degree explicable on the face of it, without any misrepresentation of S. John, or the Church, by the inevitable struggles of men's hearts and minds, when at all confronted by Christianity, to find a solution of the theological inquiry inherent in the whole mystery of the Incarnation. The Church, under the promised guidance of the Holy Spirit of Truth, had, we know, to arrive at last at the intellectual response to Christ's own parting question, 'What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is He?' The actual 'Worship of Christ as God' here first determined the general conscience (or, indeed, the conscience determined the worship). But the intellectual conception in its fulness of the Christ of God' was the formation of at least two hundred years, governed by the laws and conditions of the highest thought within the reach of man, and overshadowed by the Spirit clearly dominating the entire intellectual career.

We have thus before us the general historical conditions of Christianity in Hadrian's days as noticed by M. Renan. But he has next, as we have intimated, something to handle of a more definite kind, and not so easily disposed of by speculation-it is, in fact, the special subject of his volume-the undoubted organization of the Church,' as a body already presenting, at the outset of this second century, so remarkable an uniformity as it really claimed. The episcopate, the Church's determining centre, has to be accounted for at

once.

To most readers of antiquity it has seemed that the strong sayings, for instance, of S. Ignatius, on his way to martyrdom at Rome, did but vividly express the deep and very natural instinct of Christians everywhere, that if the Christian tradition, spreading in all lands, were to have abiding coherence, if there were to be one Christianity, and not merely many Gnosticisms,' it could only be by Christians everywhere, as hitherto, adhering to their visible centre, the bishop of each place. Any other thought would leave such language as, My soul for his, who holds fast to his bishop' (as we should feel) without excuse; but these were the martyr's natural and eager words. Taken as the dying utterance of one who had known the Apostles, and probably had seen the Lord, we

may recognize its earnestness and power; and especially at a crisis when disunion was imminent in Syria and Asia Minor, and a long future possibly was before the Church. If, at that time of peril, one trusted voice, like his, had been raised, for instance, calling all men in doubt and danger 'to cleave to Rome' (unpractical and perhaps impossible in fact), it would have been at least the watchword of all Christians probably to the end of time. Controversy could hardly have resisted it. But it was not so. 'Adhere to your own Bishop,' is the note of the martyr's warning, his last word to the Churches. Now M. Renan ignores all this, and goes at once to explain the rise of Episcopacy' in those times, by the very coarse, and perhaps absurd, modern suggestion of 'love of power.' Had any one at that time, we ask, ever known, or heard of, 'Churches' without Episcopacy?-Churches, i.e., which, contrary to the common Christian instinct, had no chief president? Love of power!' Why, ordinary Bishops of those days, de facto, so far from asserting their 'supremacy,' found their rule itself quite indefinite; and at first they left it undefined, and even for generations; till the arrangements of the whole body of the faithful-('canons' as they were called) -Apostolic and post-Apostolic, fixed for them the order and limits of jurisdiction. This, in truth, is the whole 'history' in the matter. And if an inferior partisan had written M. Renan's sixth chapter (on this subject) in the interest of some definite misbelief, we might have been simply indignant at venturous ignorance. But M. Renan is a learned man, though a man of imagination; and we are ashamed that he has forgotten his historical gifts, and has here played with his subject, till he has imagined a Bishopric in the days of Hadrian to have been a worldly prize to be struggled for, very much as in Paris in the eighteenth century. He even goes the length of suggesting, that the primitive 'charismata' were, as a fact, suppressed by the power-seeking Episcopate, notwithstanding the certainty of their long survival. We know, indeed, these gifts were subordinated to the Apostolate (as directed by S. Paul, I Cor. xiv. 37), but it was the gradual suppression of 'Montanism' (not of the charismata of Saints), which was the happy result of this subordination. With grotesque inconsistency, M. Renan at the same time says, in a sort of undertone, that Christianity needed Episcopacy (which must mean that it was involved in the Christian system), and must, he thinks, in three or four centuries have 'died out' without it. And he allows that there is no instance on record (such as his theory would ask) of a popular election of a Bishop; but